As a Heisman Trophy winner and former NFL quarterback, Danny Wuerffel could have been in many different places. He could have been in front of a TV camera, giving color commentary for college football games, or behind an office desk, closing another business deal, or maybe even on the sidelines, calling plays as an offensive coordinator.
Instead, the quarterback who led the University of Florida Gators to their lone national championship sought refuge alone at a piano at 5 a.m. in a small church in Mississippi last September. In 1996, he had tossed 39 touchdowns during his senior season. Now he played hymns, tears rolling down his cheeks as he sang, “On Christ the solid rock I stand. . . .”
Anchor in Rising Waters
A week earlier, Hurricane Katrina had ravaged the Gulf Coast, uprooting half a million people. Wuerffel’s one-story home in New Orleans had water up to the roof. Inside, nearly everything he owned was destroyed. Just two days before, Wuerffel, his wife, Jessica, and their 21-month-old son, Jonah, fled by car with only a few changes of clothes, some pictures, a video camera, some insurance papers, two pillows and two Bibles.
“We thought we’d be back home in a few days,” Wuerffel says.
But Wuerffel lived a block from the 17th Street Canal levee that breached.
Along with his home and city, Desire Street Ministries, the Christian school in New Orleans that Wuerffel was involved with, was underwater, and the whereabouts of many of the students were unknown. The quarterback turned missionary, feared some of the students had drowned.
Eventually, Wuerffel learned that all of the academy’s 190 students and 30 employees were safe. Yet even before he received the good news, Wuerffel found comfort. “As I sang in that church, I had such an overwhelming sense of peace,” Wuerffel says. “The song says that in every flood, in every high and stormy gale, His anchor holds.”
New Game
In 2003, Wuerffel left a seven-year NFL career and walked away from potential lucrative offers in broadcasting, business and coaching. Instead, he chose the road less traveled and became the development director of Desire Street Ministries and the Desire Street Academy for boys.
“If I had five lives to live, I’d do a lot of different things,” the 31-year-old Wuerffel says. “But when you have one life, you have to choose very carefully.”
His focus is on helping those less fortunate, not on making fortunes.
“In these parts, there’s God and then there’s Danny Wuerffel,” said Phil Mondy, Wuerffel’s assistant. “There’s a lot Danny could have ended up doing, that’s for sure.”
When Wuerffel told his wife his plans to choose being a helping hand and not following a more financially rewarding career, she merely said, “I thought that’s what you were going to do.”
What’s Truly Important
The Wuerffels returned to their New Orleans home a month after Katrina hit. Black mildew covered the walls throughout their home. Books in the office were “nothing more than mooch.” The family was homeless.
“We lost everything,” Wuerffel says. “The house is going to have to be bulldozed.”
Ironically, a list of things they wanted to bring when they fled before Katrina hit was still on a coffee table in their living room. The table raised and lowered with the flood, without disturbing the note.
Oh, but the Wuerffels didn’t lose things stored in the attic. Danny says with a chuckle, “The things you put in the attic are the things you don’t want.”
The disaster has helped him redefine needs and wants.
“How much time do we spend thinking we need this and that, and worry about what we don’t have?" says Wuerffel, who was displaced to his parents in Destin, Fla.. "Now we have nothing, but we have everything we need. I have my wife, my son, and we have food and shelter.”
And he has an ongoing commitment to help reestablish the Desire Street Academy and to its students who have become his friends.
Wuerffel’s focus began to shift from throwing touchdowns to saving lives his rookie year with the New Orleans Saints. That’s when he first met Mo Leverett, the missionary who founded Desire Street Ministries in 1990.
Wuerffel invited Leverett to speak at the Saints’ chapel service. That led to Wuerffel’s visit of Desire Street Ministries and a walk through the Ninth Ward, an area that had been called the murder capital of the country. As he walked through the impoverished neighborhood, Wuerffel saw a little girl holding a doll walk from an apartment building he thought was condemned.
“I couldn’t believe someone was living in there,” Wuerffel says. “I was shocked to see the living conditions of people not many miles away from where I was playing professional football.”
That memory of that little girl brought Wuerffel back to Desire Street Ministries.
Rebuilding
After the hurricane flooded New Orleans, Wuerffel helped establish a temporary boarding school in the Florida panhandle. Wuerffel’s connections with his alma mater led to signing a lease with the University of Florida to use a 4-H camp in Niceville, Fla., where 90 of the students attended the academy for this past school year. As New Orleans is being rebuilt, Desire Street Ministries Desire Street Academy will hold classes for the next several years in Baton Rouge, La.
“In the days after the hurricane, we were frantically trying to find a temporary site for our school. Frustrated after bumping into weeks of dead ends, I was at a meeting with some administrators from the University of Florida. I explained our situation and our needs. The future of the school was in question. That ‘Yes, we’ll help,’ was a significant moment in my spiritual life. I had prayed so much about finding a place. I just felt like Moses against the Red Sea with the Egyptians coming. Time was running out.”
While tragedy can bring out the worst in human beings, Wuerffel has found it can also brings out the best.
“We all watched in disbelief the looting in New Orleans,” Wuerffel says. “Now this ministry, which runs a school and provides programs for disadvantaged children, needed some help from the kindness of strangers. Someone did that.”
Within the first week after the school’s reopening, the football team bused back to New Orleans to play a game.
“You coming with?” one of the players asked Wuerffel.
“I gave him a big hug and just had to shake my head no,” Wuerffel says. “There was too much work, too much fund raising, too much paperwork.”
Occasionally, a student will pop into Wuerffel’s office, interrupting his work. He’ll look at the stack of papers in front of him and get a little frustrated.
“Then I’ll look across my desk, see that kid smiling back at me, wanting to talk, and I’ll remember that student is why I’m doing all this,” Wuerffel says. “He’ll remind me that we are focused on sharing the Gospel in both word and deed, bringing people into a right relationship with God through Jesus Christ.”
Katrina brought destruction and devastation, but also cleansing and purification.
“We’re experiencing that in our city and in our country as we see people do incredible acts of kindness, love and compassion,” Wuerffel says.
Through it all, Wuerffel says he’s had a sense of loss, but also an unexplainable confidence because people experienced the love of others in incredible ways. Ultimately, he says God was doing something good.
“Through my sorrow, my joy,” Wuerffel says “All the emotions have done nothing but draw me closer to God.” 
